Proposing indicators to measure achievement and shortfall inequality consistently

Casilda Lasso de la Vega and Oihana Aristondo ()

Journal of Health Economics, 2012, vol. 31, issue 4, 578-583

Abstract: In several economic fields, such as those related to health or education, the individuals’ characteristics are measured by bounded variables. Accordingly, these characteristics may be indistinctly represented by achievements or shortfalls. A difficulty arises when inequality needs to be assessed. One may focus either on achievements or on shortfalls but the respective inequality rankings may lead to contradictory results. In this note we propose a procedure to define indicators that measure equally the achievement and shortfall inequality. Specifically, we derive measures which are invariant under ratio-scale or translation transformations, and a decomposable measure is also obtained. As the indicators proposed depend on the distribution bounds, families of indices that guarantee the same inequality rankings regardless of the distribution maximal levels are identified.

Keywords: Inequality measurement; Health inequality; Achievements; Shortfalls (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629612000136
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Proposing indicators to measure achievement and shortfall inequality consistently (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:31:y:2012:i:4:p:578-583

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2012.02.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().